Fish plant appeals, council denies

Published
12:00 am CDT, Wednesday, October 29, 2014

GRAFTON — The city council denied American Heartland Fish Products’ appeal at the recent council meeting, filed by the company’s attorney stating the city’s 30-day nuisance abatement ruling ignored the business’ state and constitutional rights.

American Heartland Fish Products’ Ben Allen addressed a full house of council meeting attendees in late September announcing that if an environmental fish odor fix fails, the company’s plant would relocate, and that it already had contingency plans in place. His son, Peter Allen, who is the exclusively-licensed Asian carp rendering plant manager, confirmed what his father said at the subsequent abatement hearing Oct. 22.

“We’re actively looking for somewhere to move. We understand. We apologize,” Peter Allen said to those witnesses gathered at the hearing and exclusively reported by the Telegraph.

Ben Allen, who is one of three Grafton resident investors, apologized to the crowd at the September Grafton City Council meeting and said he agreed with published comments in The Telegraph from fish rendering plant neighbor, Mike Arnold, who also is the former Grafton Planning Commission chairman, that the plant emits an unacceptable odor.

The city, represented by its attorney Jim Schrempf at the abatement hearing, officially agreed that the the smell is a nuisance odor according to city code and thereby ruled the plant has 30 days to eliminate such odor or cease operations. The fish rendering company had five days to appeal, which it did on Oct. 24.

American Heartland Fish Products’ appeal to the city council reserves the company’s right to appeal to the Jersey County Circuit Court should it choose to do so and is part of a legal process.

At Tuesday night’s city council meeting, Alderman Bobbie Amburg moved to deny American Heartland Fish Products’ appeal; the motion passed unanimously.

“Having considered the order of appeal, I move that the city council sustain the order of the Grafton police chief Oct. 22,” Amburg said.

No more discussion of the fish plant situation followed the vote regarding the company’s or the city’s next move. No representative of American Heartland Fish Products was at Tuesday night’s meeting.

Yet previous to the meeting when Ben Allen stated contingency plans to relocate American Heartland Fish Products, the company’s chief executive officer Gray Magee, of Grafton, told the Telegraph that the company plans to build another plant in the Southern Illinois region.

“We have been contacted by numerous other states to consider building in those locations,” he said before the nuisance abatement hearing. “We are the only solution that has an active exit strategy. If we are successful in eradicating the Asian Carp or lowering their biomass to a manageable level to where they can be kept from entering the Great Lakes, we would just move our equipment to other locations and render pigs, chickens, cows, etcetera.”

The invasive species in the Great Lakes is a grave concern to the Midwest states and to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers due to the region’s $7 billion sport fishing industry and an invasion’s ability to reduce native species’ populations by overeating those species’ food sources, which are algae and plankton. The corps has been studying a way to eliminate such a risk for more than five years.